Ahmet Tevfik Pasha

Ahmet Tevfik Pasha was an Ottoman statesman of Crimean Tatar origin who served as the last Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. He held the office three times, the first in 1909 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and from 1918 to 1919 and from 1920 to 1922 under Mehmed VI during the Allied occupation of Istanbul. In addition to his premiership, Ahmet Tevfik was also a diplomat, a member of the Ottoman Senate, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was involved in various reforms and negotiations during the turbulent times of the late Ottoman Empire, such as the Young Turk Revolution, the Balkan Wars, the World War I, the Armistice of Mudros, the Treaty of Sèvres, and the Turkish War of Independence. He was sympathetic to the nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which resisted the Allied occupation of Anatolia. After the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922, he retired from politics and adopted the surname Okday following the Turkish Surname Law of 1934. He died in 1936 in Istanbul and was buried at the Edirnekapı Martyr's Cemetery. He was also a scholar, a playwright, and a translator who wrote the first Turkish dictionary and translated Molière's major works into Turkish. He is considered to be among the first Pan-Turkists. He was married to Elisabeth Tschumi, a Swiss woman whom he met in Athens, and had five children with her.